The present invention relates to a character recognition apparatus for optically recognizing a set of characters written on a slip or the like and, more particularly, to a character recognition apparatus which provides minimal erroneous recognition.
In conventional character recognition apparatuses, each character pattern is pre-processed and converted to extract its feature (to be referred to as a recognition feature hereinafter) geographically and metrically. The recognition feature is compared with a corresponding set of features (to be referred to as a dictionary, a set of reference character pattern or a recognition table hereinafter) of a reference character of each category to obtain a corresponding answer (category name to which the character belongs).
In order to recognize a plurality of fonts of letters or characters using a minimum size dictionary, the sizes of the characters are normalized to cover variations in character size. By this normalization, partial information among the features of the character is deliberately neglected. For this reason, such normalization degrades recognition precision for variations in characters of other categories. As a result, erroneous recognition often occurs.